Business Ethical Issues Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words - 1

Business Ethical Issues - Assignment Example However, this massive network of suppliers also posed certain problems. IKEA hogged the limelight, albeit for wrong reasons, when a Swedish television documentary revealed that the company’s rug suppliers based in South Asian countries employed children at their looms (factories). Many children worked as bonded labor to pay off their parent’s debt. Estimates revealed that close to 2, 00,000 children were employed in the carpet industry in India. In 1995, IKEA was apprised by a German documentary maker that a film had been made which provided evidence of deployment of child labor at Rangan Exports, one of IKEA’s biggest suppliers in India. Unlike the Swedish television documentary which talked of prevalence of child labor in the industry, the German documentary pointed the finger directly at IKEA and its Indian supplier. India was not a signatory to Convention 138 adopted by International Labor Organization (ILO). Countries that ratified the convention were committed to abolition of child labor. Bonded labor was prohibited in India under the provisions of Pledging of Labor Act, 1933. The government machinery was however weak and the prevalence of child labor was widespread in the country. The Indian government had also enacted the Bonded Labor System (Abolition) Act, 1976 but gained little success in eradicating the problem of child labor. The Indian government treated unbounded child labor as a socio-economic phenomenon. Many regarded children working along with their parents as a source of income for the family.